Chapter Text
She smells sawdust before she's through the door.
This is not what she expected. What she expected — what she'd braced for, in the pleasant way you brace for something you've already decided to find endearing — was chaos. Pieces on the landing. Harry looking harried, consulting instructions with the expression he gets when something won't cooperate. Possibly Arthur roped in via emergency Floo, because Harry has many qualities and one of them is knowing when to ask for help and another, occasionally contradicting it, is leaving the asking slightly too late.
She had not expected the house to be quiet.
She drops her bag at the bottom of the stairs. "Harry?"
Nothing.
She goes up.
The nursery door is open. She stops in the doorway.
The cot is assembled. Finished, standing, in the corner where they'd agreed it would go, under the window she'd insisted on so there'd be morning light. It's white. It's slightly wonky on the left side, which she clocks immediately because she has good eyes and she knows Harry, and she knows that he knows and has decided not to care, which is somehow the most him thing about it.
Harry is asleep on the floor next to it.
Not dramatically asleep — not sprawled, not uncomfortable-looking, just sitting with his back against the wall and his head dropped to one side and his legs stretched out in front of him, entirely unconscious, like he'd sat down for a moment and simply run out of road. Arthur's toolkit is open beside him. The instructions are in a pile that suggests they'd been consulted extensively and not enjoyed. There's a spare panel leaning against the wall — he bought a spare panel, of course he did — and sawdust on his jeans and a small bruise forming on his left thumb that she's going to ask about later.
She leans against the doorframe and looks at him.
She'd known he wanted to do this himself. He hadn't said so — Harry communicates want in the sideways, deniable way he communicates most things, and she'd learned years ago to read the thing underneath the thing — but she'd seen it when she mentioned her dad's offer, that particular quality of stillness that means he's deciding something. She'd told her dad they'd sort it themselves. Her dad had understood in the way her dad understands most things about Harry, which is completely and without needing it explained.
She looks at the cot.
It's slightly wonky. It's the most beautiful thing she's ever seen.
She thinks about Harry alone in this room all afternoon. She thinks about him with the instructions — three pages of English swimming in a sea of other languages, she'd seen the pack, she knows — and Arthur's tools and fourteen unlabelled dowel rods and all the time in the world to think while his hands were busy. She knows what Harry thinks about when his hands are busy and his mind goes quiet. She knows where he goes. She's traced the shape of it over years, over nights when the dreams are bad and mornings when something small catches him off guard and he goes somewhere she can't quite follow, somewhere that is made entirely of absence.
He grew up with nothing built for him.
She's thought about this. She's thought about it more since the pregnancy, in the specific way that becoming someone's parent makes you think about what it was to be someone's child. She's thought about Harry at one year old, at five, at eleven on a platform, and she's thought about what it means that this man — this specific man with his specific history — has spent every year since the war building something. Carefully. Deliberately. Like someone who knows what it means to have nothing and has decided with everything in him that the people he loves will never know that particular knowledge firsthand.
The cot is slightly wonky on the left side.
He built it alone, on a Saturday, with borrowed tools, so that she could come home and find it standing.
She sits down on the floor next to him, back against the wall, and looks at what he built, and does not bother trying not to cry, because she's seven months pregnant and she's earned it and also because no one is watching. Harry's shoulder is warm against hers. He stirs slightly — not waking, just registering her, the way he always does, some deep reflex that knows when she's close — and his head tips sideways and comes to rest on top of hers.
She looks at the cot.
She thinks: nobody is taking this from you.
She thinks: this one stays. this one is yours.
She puts her hand over his bruised thumb, carefully, not waking him, and sits there in the late evening light while the house goes quiet around them and the sawdust settles and the cot stands slightly wonky in the corner where the morning light will find it.
This one stays, she thinks again, at him, at the room, at no one.
This one stays.